JetBlue responds, blaming "unruly behavior" as issue, not tweets.

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On Tuesday, a JetBlue passenger took to Twitter to publicly complain about an hours-long delay to her flight, and she accused JetBlue of delaying her return home even longer by not letting her reboard the flight.

Boston resident Lisa Carter-Knight used Twitter to report her flight's delay, using a #JetBlue hashtag to announce to her followers—as of press time, roughly 300—that the "pilot accuses passengers of accusing him of being intoxicated demands all passengers back." As she told Philadelphia's ABC affiliate WPVI, "We had been waiting an hour, so there was a joke by another passenger—it had been a long night and he hoped there was a fully stocked bar on the airplane. The pilot ran out and said, 'That's it, everybody out by the gate. I've been accused of being intoxicated."

The pilot reportedly ordered all passengers off the flight so he could take a sobriety test as mandated by law. At that point, Carter-Knight posted six tweets about the delay, commenting on an "unruly pilot" and "false accusations" of his sobriety being questioned. When she attempted to reboard hours later, she was not allowed to do so.

"They were not comfortable with me being on the flight because I shared my experience tonight with friends and followers on a Twitter page," she told WPVI, but the report didn't confirm whether she talked about Twitter while waiting to board or whether JetBlue could only figure it out by receiving alerts thanks to her use of hashtags. Either way, Carter-Knight posted a follow-up tweet to say that she'd gotten the boot.

The WPVI report confirmed that Carter-Knight boarded a flight on a separate airline the following morning, and her JetBlue fare had been refunded. In a statement, JetBlue did not comment on Carter-Knight's allegation, instead merely confirming that the flight was delayed "due to a customer's accusation of a pilot being intoxicated." JetBlue's Twitter account has yet to reference the event.

Update: JetBlue responded to questions from Ars and clarified that Carter-Knight was denied re-entry on the flight due to "unruly behavior," not her use of social media. A company spokesperson added that other passengers tweeted about the flight's delays and were still allowed to board the plane.

"It is not our practice to remove a customer for expressing criticism of their experience in any medium," JetBlue said to Ars via e-mail. "We will remove a customer if they are disruptive and the crew evaluates that there is a risk of escalation which could lead to an unsafe environment. The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly."